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Tag Archives: Guantanamo hunger strike

In California it’s illegal to force-feed ducks and geese. However, a Federal Judge has just ruled that prisoners on hunger strikes may be force-fed. What’s bad for the goose and drake is apparently good for the jailbird.

It seems to me that we all should have a right to die—as long as we base the exercise of that right on reason or judgment and not on a transient impulse. It’s one thing to feel bad, angry or depressed and reach for a gun or pills. Deciding to jump off a bridge or set oneself on fire can be a rash and irrational act. Society has a right to intervene and impose time and treatment.

But choosing to starve to death isn’t an impulse. It takes time, will power and is a constantly renewed commitment to an outcome—either political or personal. I believe our lives and deaths should belong to us. We can make bad decisions and take foolish risks. We can show extreme bravery or bad judgment—sometimes both at once.

Whether a prisoner or a patriot, adults who have been adjudicated sane enough to stand for office or stand for trial should be considered competent to make their own decisions in terms of food, feeding and healthcare. Deciding to torture people in order to prolong their lives, or living deaths, is cruel and tragically not that unusual.

We spend fortunes trying to execute prisoners who want to live, and now we fight to feed prisoners who want to die? All of this seems perverse, even crazy, to me. We impose food and healthcare on criminals and deny them to the poor and hungry who want to eat and live. We march for the geese (and that’s fine) but stick tubes down the throats of criminals against their will. Only one month ago another Federal Judge held that force-feeding inmates at Guantanamo was illegal.